Abstract

For a sighted person, memory is strongly connected to vision and visualimages. Even a memory triggered by a smell or sound tends to be a visual one.As a memory recedes over time, photographs can be used to refresh it,restructuring it in a particularly static, almost death-like way. A person whohas died, for example, after time may be remembered more as their still visualimage, captured in a photograph, than as the sum of their personality, actions,or essential human-ness. For people without vision, however, memory works ina different way. The transition from visual to non-visual memories can betraumatic, as shown in one recently-blind person’s account of that change. Theonly way for a person without sight to refresh fading visual memories is bydescription, usually from a sighted person, and this re-structures theirmemories in a verbal rather than visual way, through community rather than inisolation. For born-blind people, or people who lost their sight very early inlife, memory is entirely structured by the remaining four senses, and can offeran insight into a more embodied, more lifelike form of recollection than thepaucity of the visual image constructed through photographs. This paper willargue that different forms of memory can deeply affect our experience ashuman beings, and that photographs are the least ‘human’ way of rememberingpeople. Objects and dialogue remind us of people - ourselves and others - in amuch more vital, life-like way. As there is surprisingly little in the literature onvisual culture on how visual memories are formed, I will combine my personalobservations on memories with those from my sources (which also eliminatesthe risk of misinterpreting how others might read images and objects).

Item Type:

Book Chapter

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